State of the Instance (February 2022)
Sorry, I've been pretty busy... although there's a few things.
New frontend
Without further ado... Bloat!
Embodying the opposite of its name, Bloat hearkens back to the turn of the century when web pages based their layouts on HTML frames and JavaScript was only for optional bells and whistles... indeed, Bloat requires no JavaScript at all!
Although, you can turn it on in the options for "extra" functionality like auto-refresh of notifications.
Ah, Bloat is so simple that it's hard to introduce. It's gray, it's fast, it can do 90% of the stuff the default frontend can (some things like chats are missing), and if you're after performance, you will like it. It can even handle threads with hundreds of posts just fine.
You can get to Bloat through bloat.cawfee.club. At first, it will ask you for a few permissions, this is expected.
Of course, Bloat is free open source software, just like Pleroma. Big thanks to the brave Bloat developers!
A place for physical backups
This month, our service provider had a strange incident where they screwed up something regarding block storage (where our media is) and one storage node got corrupted beyond repair, resulting in data loss. Luckily, Cawfee Club's storage was not on that node but it reminded me that we have no backup for posted media whatsoever - the media folder is simply too big at this point. As for the instance database itself (where data about users, posts and so on is kept), there are a few backups but they're compressed in a way that it takes a long time to restore - last time it took about three days. And they're still just in a different folder on the server, so if something catastrophic happens to the server itself, there might be no chance of recovery at all.
So I bought this 4TB drive for off-server backups. And some anime, and movies and music and personal stuff... but mainly backups.
(The backups themsevles are not set up yet, that comes later. But it's a start.)
Suspended registrations
There's been an influx of very strange spambots - over a hundred accounts in several waves altogether - that spammed a few specific accounts on other instances with mentions. (Poast even briefly defederated over this.) It made me close registrations for the time being and, frankly, I like it this way. Maybe I'll keep it for a few more days or weeks.
